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QFD Designer

The Global Standard . . .

Why have thousands of users in so many Fortune 1000 corporations worldwide standardized on QFD Designer since 1990?
Why have so many switched to QFD Designer after wasting countless hours trying to "tweak" Excel or other software?

It is So Easy to Use

It not only helps you do QFD faster and better, you can use if for any business improvement task requiring "many to many" comparisons. Here are a few examples from an endless list of uses:

Choosing a supplier

Prioritizing a task list

Designing a website

Setting up your company's marketing plan

Designing a better service or product

It was the world's first Windows application for QFD, regarded by many to be the simplest to learn and use. But, the simplicity is not at the expense of power, it is very robust. You can build all the charts and reports you need to practice QFD successfully in one package.

It will help you translate customer needs into surefire winning designs

Competing products force you to work in a series of text lists. Not here! You work right on the chart. Make a change and your chart updates immediately. Change a customer importance value for a marketplace need and see the effect in real-time. Built-in formulas quickly recalculate and redraw the Pareto bar chart designating the most critical priorities you need to focus on to achieve success. No other product, even requirements management and project management tools, allow you to map out project priorities so clearly.

WEBMine's Natural Companion

If you want the ultimate in streamlined Voice of Customer gathering, pair QFD Designer with WEBMine online. Voice of Customer data gathered usingWEBMine becomes the input to your QFD studies. WEBMineallows you to assemble and rank the needs of your target audience quickly. You leverage the reach of the web to assemble project goals or marketplace needs from the types of people (or the actual people) in the target population. While we still advocate in-person customer interaction, compiling the inputs for QFD with WebMine costs just a fraction of in-person meetings so it serves as a great supplement to your GEMBA research. If you opt for the Catalyst Suite, you get WEBMine with QFD Designer, with TRIZContrasolve too!

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) or any other business improvement task requiring “many to many” comparisons is a breeze with QFD Designer. It will help you improve satisfaction and gain market success.

Create a Design Knowledgebase

Keep a record of critical design requirements (CTQs) and their relationships to the customer's needs

Record competitive benchmarking data

Record target values in your design

Make the VOC Actionable

Gather the VOC manually or with IDEACore’s online WebMine surveyor

Enter it into QFD Designer

Brainstorm Success Factors then rank them against the VOC

Review the highest impacting priorities

Simplify team collaboration

Team members working together to complete project matrices gain greater understanding of project goals and assignments.
Want to view only a subset of the QFD data? It's simple...just Extract a subset chart.
It can be comprised of any combination of chart regions. View a
scaled down look at the problem, a great way to divide tasks.

Link supporting data

Applinks allow launch of any supporting software from within charts (e.g. Excel, CAD/CAM, Minitab, Word etc.). Great for briefings.

Add internet/intranet hyperlinks anywhere

Prioritize with a click

The list of priorities in the color Pareto/Bar Chart updates with a click, whenever you enter a relation symbol or modify an importance value.

A powerful design framework

All charts in your project are kept together in one place.

CASE EXAMPLES

DOW Corning

After a thorough analysis of competing tools, Dow Corning purchased QFD Designer for enterprise-wide use in their Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and DMAIC Six Sigma programs.

The U.S. State Department

The US State Department used IDEACore coaching and tools. WEBMine was employed in forced-tradeoff analysis, then QFD Designer, to rationalize a redesign of its critical worldwide communication system.

"The outcome of this analysis is so valuable. We couldn't have done so much in so little time without IDEACore's assistance. We will take these robust findings to Congress. When we present the outcome of this QFD and WEBMine work, the rigor of our due-diligence will make funding easier to obtain from Congress. Plus, it takes the politics out of the equation and makes the decision-making more objective"

Glenn Johnson, The U.S. State Department.

Dow Chemical

Dow Chemical gave QFD Designer their acid test, and then changed their corporate standard away from QFD Capture to QFD Designer. They use the software globally.

Black & Decker

"At Black & Decker, we attribute a large part of our success in small motor development to our usage of QFD, including its implementation with QFD Designer."

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin has recently adopted QFD Designer as their software of choice for their Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) program. They also use the software at the request of the US Army for proposals and as a communication tool for co-development of weapon systems assuring customer driven iterative design on large government contracts.

NASA

NASA employed QFD Designer for its critical 3-day Technical Challenge prioritization workshop. This intensive session was facilitated by LMI (Logistics Management Institute) and Joe Craig of IDEACore. QFD related methods and QFD Designer were used by over 100 NASA planners focused on establishing a NASA multi-year strategic plan. Future mission goals were drafted along with associated technical hurdles required for achievement. These "hurdles" were then analyzed using the power of QFD Designer to optimize and prioritize the core resource allocation in preparation of future missions:

"The customer support your company has provided is outstanding, far exceeding our expectations and by far the best we have seen in the industry. Thanks again to you and your terrific staff."

"I consider (IDEACore) tools a secret weapon for solving business and product development issues with cutting-edge technologies"

Quality Associates International has been using our tools, including QFD
Designer and WEBMine in their consulting business for many years,
including at BMW, Caterpillar and Harley Davidson.

"QFD Designer is like Excel on Steroids"

DARPA's Dan Pierson

The US Army together with DARPA did an analysis of the competing QFD
software tools, and awarded QualSoft a critical defense contract,
choosing QFD Designer as the QFD software of choice for the Future
Combat System (FCS) initiative, forming the vision of the Army for the
year 2012.

"I have recommended QFD Design to everyone I talk to about QFD or DFSS. PwC is making QFD Designer V4 part of their proposals. It is a powerful and versatile tool, which can conceivably support all of their business clusters, because they all use matrices for comparative analysis."